Died on October 17

Agrippina the Elder
a distinguished and prominent Roman woman of the first century Agrippina was the wife of the general and statesman Germanicus and a relative to the first Roman Emperors.

456

Avitus
Western Roman Emperor from 8 or 9 July 455 to 17 October 456.
He was a senator and a high-ranking officer both in the civil and military administration, as well as Bishop of Piacenza

532

Pope Boniface II
reigned from 17 September 530 to his death in 532.

739

Nothhelm
a medieval Anglo-Saxon Archbishop of Canterbury.
A correspondent of both Bede and Boniface, it was Nothhelm who gathered materials from Canterbury for Bede's historical works. After his appointment to the archbishopric in 735, he attended to ecclesiastical matters, including holding church councils. Although later antiquaries felt that Nothhelm was the author of a number of works, later research has shown them to be authored by others. After his death he was considered a saint

866

Al-Musta'in
the Abbasid Caliph from 862 to 866, during the "Anarchy at Samarra".
After the death of previous Caliph, al-Muntasir , the Turkish military leaders held a council to select his successor. They were not willing to have al-Mu'tazz or his brothers; so they elected Al-Musta'in, a grandson of al-Mu'tasim

1404

Caterina Visconti
a member of the Italian noble family Visconti, which ruled Milan from 1277 to 1447.
She was the second wife of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, the first Duke of Milan, and was the mother of two succeeding Dukes of Milan, Gian Maria and Filippo Maria Visconti. Her granddaughter was Bianca Maria Visconti, who became Duchess of Milan in 1447. Caterina served as Regent of Milan from 1402 to 1404, during her elder son's minority, but due to Gian Maria's suspicion of her alleged treason , he had his mother arrested and imprisoned in the castle of Monza, where she was presumably poisoned in 1404

1456

Nicolas Grenon
a French composer of the early Renaissance.
He wrote in all the prevailing musical forms of the time, and was a rare case of a long-lived composer who learned his craft in the late 14th century but primarily practiced during the era during which the Renaissance styles were forming

1552

Andreas Osiander
a German Lutheran theologian.

1575

Gaspar Cervantes de Gaeta
a Spanish cardinal of the 16th century.
He was a relative of the famous Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes

1586

Philip Sidney
remembered as one of the most prominent figures of the Elizabethan age.
His works include Astrophel and Stella, The Defence of Poesy , and The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia

1587

Bianca Cappello
an Italian noblewoman who was the mistress, and afterward the second wife, of Francesco I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany.
Her husband officially made her his consort

1587

Francesco I de' Medici Grand Duke of Tuscany
the second Grand Duke of Tuscany, ruling from 1574 until his death in 1587.
He was the second grand duke of the house of Medici

1616

John Pitts (Catholic scholar)
an English Roman Catholic scholar and writer.

1660

Adrian Scrope
the twenty seventh of the fifty nine Commissioners who signed the Death Warrant of King Charles He was hanged, drawn and quartered at Charing Cross after the restoration of Charles II.

1673

Thomas Clifford 1st Baron Clifford of Chudleigh
an English statesman and politician who sat in the House of Commons from 1660 to 1672 when he was created Baron Clifford.

1690

Margaret Mary Alacoque
V.H.M.
was a French Roman Catholic nun and mystic, who promoted devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus in its modern form

1700

Judah HeHasid (Jerusalem)
a Jewish preacher who led the largest organized group of Jewish immigrants to the Land of Israel in the 17th and 18th centuries.

1705

Ninon de l'Enclos
a French author, courtesan, freethinker, and patron of the arts.

1709

François Mauriceau
a French obstetrician.

1709

Grzegorz Antoni Ogiński
a Polish-Lithuanian Hetman and governor-general of the Duchy of Samogitia from 1698.

1715

Ernest Duke of Saxe-Hildburghausen
a duke of Saxe-Hildburghausen.

1716

Anne Hamilton 3rd Duchess of Hamilton
a Scottish peeress.

1744

Giuseppe Guarneri
an Italian luthier from the Guarneri family of Cremona.
He rivals Antonio Stradivari with regard to the respect and reverence accorded his instruments, and he has been called the finest violin maker of the Amati line. Instruments made by Guarneri are often referred to as Josephs or del Gesùs

1757

René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur
a French scientist who contributed to many different fields, especially the study of insects.
He introduced the Réaumur temperature scale

1768

Louis VIII Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt
the Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt from 1739 to 1768.
He was the son of Ernest Louis, Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt and Margravine Dorothea Charlotte of Brandenburg-Ansbach

1770

Henri François Le Dran
a French surgeon.

1776

Pierre François le Courayer
a French Catholic theological writer, for many years an expatriate in England.

1780

Bernardo Bellotto
an Italian urban landscape painter or vedutista, and printmaker in etching famous for his vedute of European cities.
He was the pupil and nephew of Canaletto and sometimes used the latter's illustrious name, signing himself as Bernardo Canaletto. In Germany and Poland, Bellotto called himself by his uncle's name, Canaletto

1780

William Cookworthy
an English Quaker minister, a successful pharmacist and an innovator in several fields of technology.

1786

Johann Ludwig Aberli
a Swiss painter and etcher.

1788

John Brown (doctor)
a Scottish physician.

1789

Karl George Lebrecht Prince of Anhalt-Köthen
a German prince of the House of Ascania and ruler of the principality of Anhalt-Köthen.

1799

Louis Claude Cadet de Gassicourt
a French chemist who synthesised the first organometalic compound.

1806

Jean-Jacques Dessalines
a leader of the Haitian Revolution and the first ruler of an independent Haiti under the 1801 constitution.
Initially regarded as governor-general, Dessalines later named himself Emperor Jacques I of Haiti. He is regarded as a founding father of Haiti

1833

François-Isidore Gagelin
a French missionary of the Paris Foreign Missions Society in Vietnam.
He died a martyr, and became the first French martyr of the 19th century in Vietnam. He was born in Montperreux, Doubs. He left for Vietnam in 1821. In 1826, when Emperor Minh Mạng ordered all missionaries to gather at the capital Huế, he fled to the south to Đồng Nai in Cochinchina. He was captured once and released

1836

George Colman the Younger
the son of George Colman "the Elder".
His surname is often misspelled as "Coleman"

1836

Orest Kiprensky
a leading Russian portraitist in the Age of Romanticism.
His most familiar work is probably his portrait of Alexander Pushkin , which prompted the poet to remark that "the mirror flatters me"

1837

Johann Nepomuk Hummel
an Austrian composer and virtuoso pianist.
His music reflects the transition from the Classical to the Romantic musical era

1849

Frédéric Chopin
a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist of the Romantic era, who wrote primarily for the solo piano.
He gained and has maintained renown worldwide as one of the leading musicians of his era, whose "poetic genius was based on a professional technique that was without equal in his generation." Chopin was born in what was then the Duchy of Warsaw, and grew up in Warsaw, which after 1815 became part of Congress Poland. A child prodigy, he completed his musical education and composed many of his works in Warsaw before leaving Poland, aged 20, less than a month before the outbreak of the November 1830 Uprising

1850

Login Geiden
a Dutch Admiral who commanded a squadron of the Imperial Russian Navy in the Battle of Navarino.

1854

Vladimir Alexeyevich Kornilov
a Russian naval officer who took part in the Crimean War.

1859

John Henry Kagi
an American attorney, abolitionist and second in command to John Brown in Brown's failed raid on Harper's Ferry.
He bore the title of "Secretary of War" in Brown's "provisional government." At age 24, Kagi was killed during the raid. He had also been active in fighting on the abolitionist side in 1856 in "Bleeding Kansas"

1862

George B. Anderson
a career military officer, serving first in the antebellum U.S.
Army and then dying from wounds inflicted during the American Civil War while a general officer in the Confederate Army. He was among six generals killed or mortally wounded at the Battle of Antietam in September 1862

1863

Nikolai Pomyalovsky
a Russian writer.

1865

Joseph-François Malgaigne
a French surgeon and medical historian born in Charmes-sur-Moselle, Vosges.

1868

Laura Secord
a Canadian heroine of the War of 1812.
She is known for having walked 20 miles out of American-occupied territory in 1813 to warn British forces of an impending American attack. Her contribution to the war was little known during her lifetime, but since her death she has been frequently honoured in Canada. Though Secord had no relation to it, most Canadians associate her with the Laura Secord Chocolates company, named after her on the centennial of her walk

1873

Robert McClure
an Irish explorer of the Arctic.
In 1854, he was the first to transit the Northwest Passage , as well as the first to circumnavigate the Americas

1879

John Miers (botanist)
a British botanist and engineer, best known for his work on the flora of Chile and Argentina.

1885

Charles McNeill Gray
served as Mayor of Chicago, Illinois for the Democratic Party.

1887

Gustav Kirchhoff
a German physicist who contributed to the fundamental understanding of electrical circuits, spectroscopy, and the emission of black-body radiation by heated objects.